This invention relates to calendars, and more specifically to calendars having separate pages in a hinged arrangement for display of consecutive months or other time periods.
The use of printed materials to display time sequences, and particularly the use of calendars to display designated arrangements of dates, is well known. In a typical calendar the pages thereof may be hinged attached to a backing surface, each page representing a month, or some other time period.
A user typically relies on the display on a particular page for determining time availability and scheduling. Towards the end of a month, when activities need to be scheduled in the next succeeding month, a user of a typical prior art calendar is required to turn from the page showing the current month to the page showing the next succeeding month in order to determine time availability and to schedule such events.
In order to provide some reduction in the amount of flipping and page turning required towards the end of a month, it is known in the prior art to provide a miniature representation of the dates of the succeeding month. While such representations reduce the requirement for page flipping when it is merely desired to determine the coincidence between weekdays and calendar dates, the prior art nonetheless requires such repeated page turning for actual scheduling of events in the upcoming month. The repetitive and inconvenient turning of pages is necessitated by the fact that the specific activity to be scheduled must still be written in the appropriate location of the actual page representing the next month, since making an annotation on the miniature representation of that next month is, in the first instance, difficult because of reduced size, and in the second instance, ineffective for providing the needed reminder to a user once the next month arrives and the calendar page appropriately turned.
There is thus a need in the prior art to provide a calendar upon which appropriate scheduling may be made for a succeeding month, without the necessity for repeatedly turning the pages thereof at the end of the month, thus avoiding redundant and erroneous planning or scheduling, and providing visibility of one's notes for succeeding time periods.
In one prior art calendar, described in Dailey, U.S. Pat. No. 669,319, there is disclosed an arrangement wherein a current and a succeeding month may be simultaneously shown. However, such a calendar requires the use of a continuous fan-folded display of all the months of a year on a single lengthy sheet. In the calendar described therein, when a month draws to a close, the calendar fan-fold is unfolded once to expose the page showing the next succeeding month. Once the next succeeding month draws to a close, the fan-fold is unfolded one more time.
Clearly, the page illustrating the previous month must be detached from the fan-folded arrangement in order to maintain a reasonable size for the calendar. Thus, any record keeping function of the calendar for future recollection is destroyed by the arrangement. If, on the other hand, a user chooses to retain each of the expired months, a difficult refolding process is necessitated to regenerate the fan-folded arrangement for the expired months.
There is thus a need in the prior art for a multipage calendar providing a simultaneous display of a plurality of time periods, notwithstanding a pagewise division therefor, and permitting straightforward retention and storage of data entered on the multiple pages.